In fact, we had already resigned ourselves to La La Land, a musical love letter to Hollywood and romantic clichés, besting the much more powerful portrait of the black LGBT experience. We had even already drafted a frustrated think piece on the significance of the slight which we were prepping to send when it was announced in a kerfuffle thatMoonlight had indeed won.

Rarely does the cinema maxim “a story we need now” hold up as fiercely as it did when Moonlight burst on the scene last year, a story told in three acts about a black man named Chiron struggling to accept his identity, his sexuality, and his masculinity throughout a life full of barriers—some cultural, some familial, some societal, and some institutional and political.